Thursday night’s dinner:
Potato Pizzas with Roasted Garlic Lemon Broccoli, served with a bottle of homemade wine that we were given.
I topped the potatoes with “pizza sauce”, fresh tomato slices, onion, mushrooms, and black olives. I substitute Ragu pasta sauce every time a recipe calls for any kind of tomato sauce – I figure that tomato sauce is tomato sauce, and I have a cupboard full of it, so I may as well use it. I quite like the extra flavor that it lends, and I have yet to find a recipe that it didn’t work in.
This tasted more like yummy baked potatoes than pizza, partly because I just cut them in half instead of slicing them thinly as recommended in the recipe.
I love this broccoli recipe, but I’m still tweaking it. It seems like the broccoli is either underdone or too brown, so I’m looking for that happy medium. This is also partly due to my whacked out oven – I need a new one, so let me know if you see any coupons for ovens!
Yesterday’s brunch:
Oven baked banana pancakes.
This was interesting. I was using a pancake recipe from my favorite Betty Crocker cookbook, when I accidentally misread 1 tablespoon of sugar as 1 cup. OOPS! To try and compensate, I added more flour and eggs. I had also put in two organic bananas, apple butter, nutmeg, cinnamon, allspice, a dash of vanilla, and some lemon flavoring. It certainly had a very interesting texture when I pulled it out of the oven. It was very dense – definitely more like a banana bread than a pancake. I didn’t care for it, but apparently Jai liked it, because he was snacking on the leftovers all day.
Yesterday’s dinner:
Vegan Chili, cornbread and pineapple chunks. This was served with beer, which was also given to us!
Yum! This was good. This isn’t spicy in the slightest, which is perfect for me. And yes, I used Ragu pasta sauce in this, too!! It hasn’t failed me yet!
All those corn muffin mixes that I got free over the summer came in handy for this meal. If you’re wondering about the pineapple – I read somewhere that serving pineapple as a garnish with bean dishes is supposed to make it easier to digest. Who knows if that’s actually true, but I love pineapple so it doesn’t matter! I’d like to give a quick shout out to The Glamorous WAHM, since I won the jar of pineapple and some other fruits in a giveaway that she hosted recently.
As usual, this made a ton of food. We had leftovers for lunch this afternoon, and there’s still a lot of cornbread left.
You may have noticed that both of these dinners were from vegan recipe websites (although not 100% vegan the way I prepared them). I’m going to experiment with making a few meals like this every week, in an effort to eat more veggies and cut some calories. We’re in the thick of the holiday season, so I figured I better start my new year’s resolution early – between all the inevitable holiday cookies, turkey dinners, and my cupboard full of free Lindt chocolate, I need all the help I can get!
